Platforms

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Facebook Open Platform is a snapshot of the infrastructure that runs Facebook Platform. It includes the API infrastructure, the FBML parser, the FQL parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags.

For software developers with knowledge of PHP, Ning APIs, and the social network's code structure and guidelines, you can completely customize your social network's behavior. To get a copy of the code and join our developer program, send us an email

OpenID - the decentralization of personal identity on the web. You will not maintain different identities with different providers unless you want to. One password, one username. You own your identity

OAuth - an authentication standard that will allow service providers to authenticate themselves and their user against other service providers without asking users for passwords or indeed any information other than their established identity. It can be used on top of OpenId.

DataPortability - an initiative spear-headed by Google and Facebook that shows they are commited to interchange of data. It will use open standards like OpenId and oAuth to create seamless data portability between service providers in a secure manner (it is commited to doing this via an open standard anyone can implement). This means you could post your photos to flickr and facebook would know all about them (if you want it to), import your contacts from last.fm into facebook, and so on. (a use case)